40th Edition.
able to prove the charge; or, as his first biographer asserts, his assailant was so powerful as to defy accusation. The secret was kept, at the time, with a success that to us seems incomprehensible, and has created controversy and speculation which has not decreased with years. But it would appear that until the ploughshare of accident shall turn up from the fallow earth of the literary past, or until the jealous guard which is posted over the letters in the Biblioteca Nacional shall be relaxed, speculation and conjecture are vain. Luis de Aliaga, the King’s Confessor, Alarcon the Dramatist, Bartolomé de Argénsola, Cervantes’ one-time friend; the monk Perez, who wrote La Picara Justina; and the great Lope de Vega himself have all been laid under the suspicion of being the writer of the false Don Quixote. The weight of circumstantial evidence bears hardest upon Vega, whose private letters have disclosed his ill-will and envy towards Cervantes; whose life and character—despite the arguments urged by his apologists—convict him, at least, of being capable of committing so foul a deed; and whose method of waging literary warfare was quite in the manner of the false Prologue. A man of his arrogant disposition would resent bitterly the criticism which Cervantes applied to his plans in the First Part of his magnum opus, and we can believe of him that he would stop at nothing to be revenged upon his critic. A jealous, unscrupulous, intolerant man, confident of the protection of friends in high places; a libertine who acted as procurer for the Duke of Sessa; an officer of the Holy Inquisition; and the only real rival to Cervantes in the arena of letters—if Lope de Vega did not himself pen the false Don Quixote, he will go down to posterity as the suspected inspirer of the basest literary atrocity that has ever been perpetrated.
On this point, as on most details affecting Cervantes, Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly is emphatic in his conclusion, and he accepts the decision by Máinez, that if the hand is the hand of Avellaneda, the voice is the voice of Lope de Vega. He finds in the character of the celebrated dramatist the temperamental fitness for such a task, and he locates the incentive in his unsupportable jealousy. “Till Don Quixote appeared no rival had ever dared to come within the shadow of his throne, and its lasting success was torment to his soul. It was too plain that the world had gone stark mad, captivated by the book of the poverty-stricken, maimed wanderer who, after a life of squalid failure, had had the assurance to produce a masterpiece. It was no longer possible to kill Don Quixote by the cheap sneer that no one was such an ass as to praise it. Lope had played that card, and no longer cherished any such delusion.... But it was still possible to injure; still possible to defame; still possible to rob the old man of a few doubloons; still possible to deride him, to wound his pride, to forestall his market by writing a continuation of the accursed volume which had dared to thrust itself
DON QUIXOTE ABSORBED IN THE READING OF BOOKS ON KNIGHT ERRANTRY.
Paris, 1845.
41st Edition.
between Lope and the public;” and so, though other biographers may canvass every contemporary writer and weigh the relative qualifications and provocations of envious poets and resentful prelates, Mr. Kelly refuses to look beyond Lope de Vega for the author of the false Second Part of Don Quixote.